With the tremendous growth of services such as YouTube, and the increasing availability of affordable editing software and video equipment, many e-mail marketers have begun to wonder if they are able to embed a video into their e-mail campaigns. Unfortunately, as tempting as the idea sounds, it isn’t currently possible. Most of the video players utilize Flash technology, which will not work in most e-mail clients (answering another question we often get from our clients.)

However, this does not mean you cannot take advantage of this online video explosion. E-mail can be an excellent tool to encourage people to visit your website and view your video. Our recommendation would be to take a screenshot from your video and turn it into a thumbnail image, which you would then place in your e-mail and link to your video page. This is a very compelling method to generate hits to your website and, more specifically, your video.

If you’d like to test this approach, simply use the thumbnail method described above, and include a few text links to your video as well. In most cases, the reporting for the campaign will show that recipients were much more likely to click on the thumbnail image as opposed to the text links. Not only does this work significantly better than trying to directly embed the videos, but you will also increase traffic to your website, with the hopes that they will stay and navigate through your entire site after viewing the video.

For more information on Applied Info Group’s database and email marketing service capabilities, please contact Mitch Rubin, President of Applied Info Group at (908) 241-7007. Visit www.appliedinfogroup.com to learn more.

By delivering customized, effective postal and email marketing communications, you improve the efficiency and results of your marketing programs. Our secure web-based reporting, campaign tracking, and advanced query systems allow you to access your data at any time, in real time, helping you to make critical decisions on your time.